Understanding Your Personal Conflict Style
Welcome to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build a positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years, ensuring that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy.
In this episode, we talk about conflict. Everyone has their own style of how they engage or disengage with conflict. In this episode, Brian, Linda, and I share a little bit about we navigate conflict, where our personal conflict styles come from, and how you can better understand your own conflict styles. Enjoy!
What is Conflict?
Conflict is tension that invites a response. Neurologically, it represents a threat or a tension that immediately triggers our brain to go into a defensive posture. Even just talking about conflict can stir something up. The first thing we want to do is to protect ourselves, which is natural, but how we do that is different and unique to each and every one of us. At Leadership Vision, we frequently deal with conflict when we work with our clients, but before we can really address anything, we have to establish trust and an understanding of where styles of navigating conflict come from.
Understanding Your Personal Conflict Style
How well do you understand your triggers when conflict is arising and how is it that you naturally respond? What can you do to help shape your response to better improve your interactions with other people? Some people are really aware of their unconscious triggers while others have no clue, but what they do know is how they respond when conflict happens. Are you more familiar with what triggers you or are you more familiar with how you respond?
One of the things we ask all of our participants to do to better understand how they navigate conflict is to consider four key elements:
1. Family of Origin
How has your family of origin shaped how you navigate conflict? How was conflict handled in your home growing up? What conflict styles were modeled for you?
2. Environment
How has the environment in which you were raised shaped how you navigate conflict? Environment can be your home, your school, your town, or anywhere you spent significant time growing up.
3. Culture
How has your culture shaped how you navigate conflict? Think about the culture of your family, your social culture, religious culture, etc.
4. Time in History
How does your current time in history shape how you navigate conflict?
How Do You Respond to Conflict?
Conflict is inevitable. It happens to all of us, but it can also sharpen us and challenge us to be better people. How do you think and feel about conflict and what it means? Pay attention to the different tensions in your life. How do you respond to them? How do you show up? And what can you learn? We’d love to hear from you! Connect with me at nathan@leadershipvisionconsulting.com.
About The Leadership Vision Podcast
The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in the discovery, practice, and implementation of a strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. We believe that knowing your Strengths is only the beginning. Our highest potential exists in the ongoing exploration of our talents.
Please contact us if you have ANY questions about anything you heard in this episode or if you’d like to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.
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